Hi Nic, -- you beat me to it by some minutes -- you are absolutely correct on
your assessment of what appears as an always-present background hubris that can
be found more than often embedded within the 'hacker aesthetic' (among other
techno-social configurations). It makes sense that a way-of-going -- while
having some progressive social beliefs but that is otherwise embedded
(literally!) in the techno-social infrastructure -- that it could never deny
that the use of its tools are part of the problem.
And perhaps my response is not valid: if I go back and read this as a Lament,
well, then, yes, things are going to hell, and maybe I disagree with the
details, the general emotional content is understandable.
(and a side note -- NYC seems over-controlled, but maybe not overdeveloped in
the big picture -- it's been sliding towards a more chaotic state for some time
now, if the general infrastructure is any indication, there are far more
over-developed places on the planet these days)
This is the meaning of the Anthropocene: that the futures of the
human and material worlds are now totally entwined. Just as Nietzsche
declared that God is dead, now we know that ecology is dead. There
is no longer a homeostatic cycle that can be put right just by
withdrawing. There is no environment that forms a neutral background
to working and hacking.
But this *is* bunk. If you don't think there is a homeostatic cycle that will
override anything humans can produce, you need to get out more!
While, yes, if you subscribe to an Indra's Net pov, then every small action or
change anywhere affects all other things simultaneously and forever, sure humans
have impacted the cosmos. But so has everything else. And, sure, human
reconfigured nuclear materials and such are 'long term' compared to our puny
existences, but they will not end life, as a general phenomena, on the planet.
Maybe I'm not reading you correctly here, the future of nature (the material
world) has never been separable from the future of (human) life on the planet.
If you follow the Gaia model, what is typically construed as Life is a subset of
larger, wider systems that are churning into that future -- humans and all
they've done, thought, said, and believed are not the defining factor in that
impulsion to order.
Just as the category of `man' collapses once there is no God, so
too the category of the social collapses when there is no environment.
This could be very helpful, to be sure, to eliminate some categories and names
that muddy a clearer perception of *what is*. To become child-like or
unselfconsciously pre-cognitive. The social becomes the world becomes the
environment, humans become only another transitory form of life. All the mess of
society is dross and noise getting in the way of more fundamental perception.
The material world is laced with traces of the human, and the human
turns out to be made of nothing much besides displaced flows of this
or that element or molecule.
Well, if you want to go to Sagan's 'we are stardust,' sure, but we are not
masters of all we see. We are a short-term blip on the face of the planet. The
social easily fades away based on one's point of view and/or the world view one
subscribes to. Maybe it never existed to begin with. We are as any other living
organisms that without exception alter the energy flows that they are a part of.
We have, from a strictly material metric altered certain flows that other
life-forms have not. But regarding, for instance, CO2, bacterial life forms
altered the global atmosphere on a much greater scale. And the fact that they
did doesn't 'make a difference' compared to us, does it?
All that said, I concur with your apparent cynicism regarding human social
systems. But maybe that's just they way it is -- we are riding Life -- yet Life
is the master here, not humans. And the trajectory (and 'meaning') of Life could
perhaps be simply described as a quicker path for order to spend itself into
chaos, and thus wind down the cosmos... The more order, the more
over-development that we impose, the more we consume, the quicker it all winds
down... The level of order that a cybernetic society imposes on the world has
sped up our use of energy to maintain it all by orders of magnitude over
pre-digital societies. A hacker utopia feeds this and feeds on this, and, I
guess if you live in the moment alone with Buddha, it's quite okay to suggest
that we 'build it & live in it' but somehow this seems to be exactly what we are
doing already. And that this, here, now, is either the greatest 'utopia' humans
can create, or Hell, or both, simultaneously...
jh
--
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD
grounded on a granite batholith
twitter: @neoscenes
http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]
